If you’ve been trying to shed a few pounds, you may feel like you’ve hit a brick wall. Everyone knows that what you eat and how active you are can have a huge impact, but there are other factors in play as well. One can feel very lost when trying to find a balance and type of diet that feels appropriate. Perhaps the knowledge of what is in your personal best interest, lies within you.

Some people eat chicken wings with bleu cheese dressing and celery sticks and drop loads of weight (as long as they avoid the carbs). But as soon as they find their ideal weight, they balloon back up to their original weight or even higher. Some people monitor every calorie and keep it under a certain number, regardless of the actual food they eat, and have the pounds shed themselves that way. Others seem to eat what they want when they want to, and the pounds either come off or they maintain their weight. Those are just a few of the current standards and it is not even accounting for vegetarian and vegan diets, organic diets, macrobiotic diets, and the like. Even researching a single, supposedly healthy ingredient online will pull up many different studies that completely contradict one another. Looking around at people you know who have successfully taken some weight off can be confusing as well, as their diet plans will seem contradictory too. What is a person do to?

More people are beginning to experiment with getting more in tune with their bodies. Many are finding great success in looking and feeling the way they want to while not experiencing such struggle and emotional turmoil. What if you body is craving an item because it contains chemicals, nutrients, minerals, or complexes that your body needs to run its best? It’s easy to assume that our scientific and medical community has reached its highest pinnacle possible, but when in centuries past when demons were held responsible for physical ailments, the same was thought then. Perhaps we can’t prove scientifically what our bodies innately understand.

In millennia past, there have been all kinds of plagues and pestilence. Mortality rates for human beings were shockingly high by today’s standards. Life expectancy throughout most of history was half of what it is in the modern world within the first world nations. There obviously were many factors in play but what were the most common denominators across the board? Sanitation and the cleanliness of available water were big influences in determining how disease flourished or dwindled throughout a society.

Methods like fermentation were groundbreaking in making hydration available. Particularly in lands that were not always privy to consistent moisture, storing water was essential for survival. But water can easily become dangerously contaminated when not stored properly and in ancient times, knowing how to store it properly was not information that was available. Beer, mead, wine, and other types of alcoholic beverages were made by fermenting sugars derived from grains or fruits and were essential to the survival of some societies, as they had a much longer shelf life than improperly stored water.

Waste management was a major issue as well. During the Industrial Revolution in America, there was much wealth and commerce in the epicenter of American culture at the time, New York City. Because of the massive population growth at the time from immigration, many shoddy tenements popped up with people crammed in from wall to wall. Without any proper system for waste disposal, disease rates skyrocketed and mortality rates went through the barely constructed roofs. When a proper sanitation system was instilled, the disease rates drastically dropped. Obviously, cleanliness was a major issue in preventing illness.

Many people, however, are arguing that we have taken it to an extreme today. Most people know that washing hands after using restroom facilities, before eating and preparing food, and whenever contact with an ill person has taken place increases one’s chances of remaining healthy. But with the rampant use of hand sanitizers by some, the argument is that our immune systems are not getting enough exposure to bacteria to fight infection. Slightly relaxing their standards may sustain optimum health.